Last updated 26 February 2021 ·
Progress meetings are essential to address the direction of work, align expectations and lead a team forward to ultimately achieve targets and move the dial each week, especially if you have stretch goals to achieve.
We recommend holding progress meetings twice a week, first thing on a Monday to address focus for the week ahead and first thing on a Friday to review the progress made, but keep them short, and on point!
However, we know that with such regular routine tasks they can occasionally lose momentum and require an injection of new life once in a while to energise the team and provide positive motivation for the week. These meetings require time and focus from everyone in attendance making it essential that every minute counts and the team leave feeling empowered to succeed.
Here are 10 questions to ask yourself when planning your weekly meetings and some ideas to help you get the most out of them:
1. What outcome do I want from my morning team briefing?
It’s important to have a clear outcome for the meeting to ensure everyone gets value from their time commitment
2. How can I quickly share where we are as a team?
Before the meeting starts, familiarise yourself with the progress made last week and how each individual is performing towards their objectives. If you are using Reclaro with access to the team overview dashboard, this will show you how each team or individual is performing in your business at a glance. As a guide, your 12-month plan should move forward by 8% per month or 25% each quarter.
3. What does an outstanding week/day look like to us as a team?
Clarify with each team member what a great day looks like to them, all we need is more and more great days, take each day at a time. This could be made up of smaller targets being met such as a number of outbound sales calls being made, a number of LI connections, moving a prospect to the next stage of the sales process etc. Make this clear with the whole team and inspire them to achieve this in doing so.
4. How can I increase team engagement?
Encourage team togetherness and motivation by having clearly focused values and even a team #. In my experience, this has worked very well in the past, we even had one team use #BeYourBest and then get mugs and pens printed with this to remind them daily. We found this worked well to bring everyone together and you can have a bit of fun with it.
5. How can I encourage accountability?
Within the Monday morning meeting, you could ask each team individual for their weekly pledge or promise in terms of what their main outcome will be for that week. This could be something like generating X number of new leads or having X number of customer meetings. You can then review these at the end of the week. Make sure these pledges are achievable with some stretch, this is meant to encourage motivation, not to overwhelm.
6. How can I celebrate the progress we make as a team?
It’s important to celebrate your successes, this is often easier with a sales team bringing in more customers but it’s also vital for other teams within the business to ensure they feel valued and realise how their work affects the overall business performance. You could incentivise progress made each week and the person that makes the most progress towards their objectives gets some sort of recognition. For more information on this, read our blog on 8 tips to align and engage distributed teams.
7. How can I keep the meeting focused and on point?
You could introduce the 90x2 update in which you give each team member 90 seconds to tell the team what they’ve achieved during the week to move their dial and then 90 seconds to talk through what their focus is for the week ahead. In just 3 minutes you will get a good idea of how each person is performing.
8. How can I introduce the sharing of monthly wins?
Similar to point 6, but at a team level, successes should be celebrated on a weekly and monthly basis to spark motivation and team engagement. Ask each team to share their monthly wins, any positive customer feedback they’ve received or milestones they’ve reached, how have they moved the business closer to achieving the overall strategic vision?
9. How can I ensure we are sticking to our core values as a business?
If you have 5-6 values you can certainly build them into your Monday meeting and allocate one value to discuss each week. Then the team managers can give recognition to those team members who have, ‘lived the values’ that week during the Friday meeting. One business I work with has a LOVE candle which they light each morning and then extinguish at night. LOVE stands for Live Our Values Everyday.
10. How can I ensure that everyone on the team understands what we’re going to achieve?
This is the secret sauce and where it becomes fundamental to ensure you are effectively cascading your company vision and overall strategic objectives throughout all of your distributed teams and levels. Getting everyone on the same page and in sync so their objectives correspond with the business priorities means they can then work on the right things to really make a difference. If you aren’t already set up in Reclaro, our free 1-3-5® Templates can help you. Having individual 1-3-5® plans for each member of your teams will empower them to think like leaders and behave like owners, taking full responsibility for their contribution. Pull that off and you’ve won!
Reclaro offers a simple, OKR system based on the award-winning 1-3-5® methodology that allows strategic objectives to be recorded and effectively cascaded throughout the whole business increasing alignment, accountability and visibility of performance. The Team Overview Dashboard loads in 3 seconds and shows live performance data of all teams in the business, all in one single view. If you would like to find out more, please email pete@reclaro.com or book a demo today!
